Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time
“Rising very early before dawn, Jesus left and went off to a deserted place, where he prayed.” Mk. 1:35
A recent New York Times column invites us to play this game:
“The next time you’re sitting among a group of friends or out on a date, measure how much time passes before someone grabs their phone to look at it. How long can you last?”
As an addiction specialist, I was intrigued by the author’s contention that: “No matter who you are it can be near impossible to pry anyone away now from their mobile playthings.” Looking incessantly at our mobile devices, the author insists, has become a “social and physiological addiction.”
The article goes on to report that the common position of “bending our neck to text or check Facebook” has significantly increased the gravitational pull on our head and the stress on our neck to the point of placing “60 pounds of pressure” on our neck, which can then lead to the “incremental loss of the curve of the spine.” There’s even a medical description for this now: “Text neck.”
But, more than the health issues this addiction can cause, there is the further problem of “our communication skills and manners” being seriously affected as well. It’s even being described by some experts as “antisocial.” Perhaps most alarmingly, one leading sociologist claims that “What’s happening more and more is we’re not talking to our children. We put them in front of the tech when they’re young, and when we’re older, we’re absorbed in our own tech.”
Added to all this, according to the National Safety Council, is the danger created by this addiction: cellphone use makes drivers more accident prone than drunk driving, causing 1.6 million crashes annually, mostly involving young people ages 18 to 20. One out of four accidents in the United States are caused by texting.
What kind of remedy would help correct this problem?
I suggest the one today’s Gospel offers:
“Rising very early before dawn, Jesus left and went off to a deserted place, where he prayed.”
Jesus’ practice of going “off to a deserted place” to pray made a lasting impression on his disciples. This was a different way of praying than the ordinary Jew was accustomed to, since their prayer life tended to be more public, more segmented.
This is why, in another Gospel passage, the disciples came to Jesus after one of his nights spent in continual prayer and said: “Lord, teach us to pray.”
They evidently saw the value of this kind of prayer reflected in what they saw happen in Jesus’ life: his ability to be involved in intense activity on a daily basis; his ability to heal the sick and relentlessly preach the Good News of God’s love for all; his ability to deal with the constant pressure of so many people seeking to touch him, plead with him, hear him.
What Jesus’ prayer life made clear is that he needed to be alone and in frequent, regular contact with his/our Father.
Without that supremely important contact, Jesus’s fear was that he wouldn’t be able to resist having all the attention he was getting go to his head. He didn’t want to be sidetracked.
Instead, Jesus always wanted to do only one thing: the will of his/our Father. To do that, Jesus knew that he needed regular contact with God through silence and solitude.
We need the same.
And with the multitude of distractions multiplied by our social media devices, this need has never been more obvious.
Fr. Jose Pagola, a Spanish scripture scholar, reminds us that “one of the most positive features of contemporary Christianity is the awakening of the need to foster communion with God through silence and meditation. The most enlightened and responsible Christians want to lead the church today toward a more contemplative way of living.”
As the New York Times article suggests, the need for this kind of “calling time out on the field,” is urgent. We need to go into “a huddle with God,” if you will. And we need to take a breather on a daily, not just weekly basis.
We need more time to be alone – alone to allow our inner spirit to be refreshed and reinvigorated. We need to be in a place of silence – away from all the constant busyness and unrelenting distractions that have become a hallmark of our lifestyle. We need to enter into a retreat atmosphere on a regular basis so we can find the spiritual strength to do the healing and the helping that reflects a lifestyle dedicated to making Jesus’ Gospel message central to our life.
Otherwise, we will easily exhaust our spiritual stamina in non-stop busyness. Or, in the case of our enslavement to our mobile devices, to again quote Fr. Pagola, “We risk falling into activism and suffering from burn-out and inner emptiness.”
We risk, in effect, becoming like Job as he cries out in today’s first reading:
“Is not man’s life on earth a drudgery … a slave who longs for the shade?”
Jesus offers neither drudgery nor enslavement.
He points instead to another option: prayer; quiet prayer; contemplative prayer; solitary prayer; refreshing prayer.
“Rising very early before dawn, Jesus left and went off to a deserted place, where he prayed.”
Ted Wolgamot, Psy.D.
11809194.1
2/2/18
